Review: Vivid Fallout: New Vegas Is a Captivating Desert Playground

The post-apocalyptic Sin City of Fallout: New Vegas is populated by more robots than you probably remember from your bachelor party.Image courtesy Bethesda Softworks

I love Las Vegas. Ever since I first saw the movie Swingers, I’ve been obsessed with the glitz and glamour of Sin City. I’ve only made it to Vegas once, but my time there cemented my image of the city as a hedonistic playground for adults.

Similarly, Fallout: New Vegas is a playground for gamers.

New Vegas, released Oct. 19 for PC, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 (reviewed), can aptly be described as “Fallout 3 in the desert.” If one wanted to go a little further, a better summary might be “Fallout 3 in the desert, with better characters, environments and story choices.”

This follow-up to Bethesda’s celebrated open-world role-playing game features a setting that’s far more enticing than a bombed-out Washington, D.C., with glitzy casinos marking a significant improvement over endless subways and roadblocks. While you won’t find any ramshackle shanty cities as creative as Megaton, you will find a wider variety of locales, ranging from a Roman-inspired tribal camp to a nut-infested Air Force base.

Once you check in to New Vegas, it’s hard to leave.

Sleep with one eye open in the desert, or you might wake up to a ninja in the face.Image courtesy Bethesda Softworks

Though the Vegas strip does play a large part in the game’s storyline, you’d be remiss if you didn’t take the time to explore the surrounding desert. Like the Capital Wasteland of Fallout 3, the Mojave is filled to the brim with funny little details and memories of pre-apocalyptic life. Dreary shades of green and yellow are rendered vividly, and the irradiated critters of the desert can be terrifying to behold.

Just don’t go into New Vegas expecting to hit the slots right away. When your character — a hapless courier who gets caught up in a delivery gone wrong — is woken up after suffering a bullet to the skull, you’ll find yourself in a small outpost in the corner of the desert, wondering who shot you and why. You won’t get to see the city proper for at least a few hours, which helps build anticipation for the spectacular neon strip.

Once there, the plot abruptly shifts course: You start out looking for revenge but soon get caught up in a full-scale conflict revolving around the all-important Hoover Dam. The way in which you choose to deal with each faction in Nevada directly affects how the game plays out, and you’d have to play through multiple times to experience everything.

Every action has a consequence. Assist the New California Republic, and members of their sworn enemy Caesar’s Legion will kill you on sight. Each group in the game, from major to minor, has its own quests and tasks that you can perform or ignore at your discretion. The groups all have their own idiomatic cultures.

Little details reward the careful player of Fallout: New Vegas. Even insignificant homes are filled with tin cans and all sorts of random objects that give life to the game’s world. At many points, you’ll be given the freedom to figure out story details on your own with no narrative shoved down your throat. That empty shack with a bed, gun and ammo? Maybe somebody lived there once, hunting down animals and fighting for survival until he just couldn’t make it anymore. Maybe that abandoned gas station was once a thriving part of society. Maybe that mutant scorpion wasn’t always this bloodthirsty.

The combat isn’t as well-designed as the settings. As in Fallout 3, you engage with enemies using a system that’s something of a hybrid of role-playing and first-person shooting. At any time, you can pause the real-time combat and target an opponent’s body parts with varying levels of accuracy. The trouble with this mechanic is that skill only gets you so far — unless your character is physically strong, enemies will overpower you. I rolled a character that was gifted with powers of persuasion, which don’t much help when you’re up against hordes of Deathclaws all along the road to New Vegas. Dying 10 times per trip is never fun.

Fallout: New Vegas has been lambasted across the internet for glitches and bugs, but I didn’t have any issues with the Xbox 360 version. My copy of the game didn’t seem to have any significant problems. In the 30-plus hours I’ve spent with New Vegas so far, the game crashed only once — not ideal, but not a major problem, either.

That said, Game|Life writer John Mix Meyer experienced crippling bugs while playing through the PC version. For example, his computer-controlled traveling companions disappeared completely but were still recognized by the game as being in his party — so he was flying solo without the ability to recruit replacements. (Meyer refuses to touch the game again until developer Obsidian releases another patch.)

You can beat the entire main story of Fallout: New Vegas in less than 20 hours, but that would be giving the game short shrift. It is really about savoring every little detail and side quest until you’ve seen everything there is to see. It’s about customizing your character in order to tackle quests in new ways. And it’s about diving into a world that allows for complete, unadulterated immersion.